We study a buyer's problem of auditing suppliers within an existing network to ensure social responsibility compliance. The buyer suffers economic damages if a violation at a supplier is exposed (whether by the media, regulator, or NGO). To avoid damages the buyer may audit the network to...

This paper examines how a firm's financial distress and the legal environment regarding the ease of bankruptcy reorganization can alter product market competition and supplier-buyer relationships. We identify three effects, predation, bail-out, and abetment, that can change firms' behavior from...

The presence of strategic customers may force an already financially distressed firm into a death spiral: Sensing the firm's financial difficulty, customers may wait strategically for deep discounts in liquidation sales. In turn, such waiting lowers the firm's profitability and increases the...

Innovations in consumer products frequently rely on technological advances across multiple tiers in a supply chain. Considering the consumer market demand and downstream investment conditions as input, we model a game in a two-tier supply chain where downstream firms choose to adopt different...

This paper demonstrates optimal policies for capacitated serial multiechelon production/inventory systems. Extending the Clark and Scarf (1960) model to include installations with production capacity limits, we demonstrate that a modified echelon base-stock policy is optimal in a two-stage...